I never went to lunch in high school, not even once. I spent every such period in the library, until senior year, when I went to an alternative school that didn’t have cafeteria dining. There I could leave campus at will, and by then I had a full-time job, with just enough money to visit the Borders on Peachtree Street in Buckhead, Atlanta, where thanks to an educated and affluent population the nonfiction section abounded in serious history, political science, philosophy, and religious works. I was the only person I knew who went there.
I’ve written before about what my high school library meant to me. It was an oasis from the chaos and dysfunction of the place, a once decent working-class area institution enriched by diversity into a crime and violence-plagued ghetto, in every sense. Looking back, I’m amazed at how good of a collection it was, and the librarians there were willing and able to hunt down books on a variety of subjects for me from other places. It made me who I am.
We forget sometimes that the word ghetto didn’t originally connote poverty or squalor, merely isolation from the wider culture. In that sense, modernity has, while ostensibly uniting us through the machinations of the internet, rendered every man a ghetto unto himself. De Tocqueville predicted this outcome for a society that embraced liberal democracy:
The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
He missed the mark only in his assumption that men would generally still have children and friends, both increasingly uncommon. Regarding that last line, he was more right than he could have known. Americans are not simply disconnected from the broader world around them, but that greater country from which they came, the patria of their heritage. It was a trend he observed in the 1830s, from which he might have extrapolated some predictions more specifically, as he did with wider observations. Americans, for the most part, don’t read much.
Certainly, books still sell. There are a lot of great writers on Substack. But cut out astroturfed political twaddle and female-oriented softcore pornography and (at least regards fiction) you’re not left with much someone otherwise inclined to read might seek out. The publishing industry is mainly geared toward employing a small number of highly credentialed women who produce books written by a larger circle of similarly credentialed women for a still slightly larger body of likewise credentialed women, all of whom live in a small range of urban areas, are miserable, and are utterly oblivious to anything beyond their particular complaints about life. There is a great deal of great non-fiction out there, but the readership for that is a smaller pool. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country just spends the day internet-bingeing, which is near the exact opposite of reading.
Yes, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. But in fairness, I wrote under a pen name AND it did get published by University of California Press, so it must have substantial scholarly value.
With the people I encounter in my daily life, the supposition seems to be that words are words, and that reading on the internet is categorically the same thing as reading books. I disagree profoundly. There’s nothing wrong with reading on the internet in and of itself (please keep reading this, for example), but there is an important distinction with print. The internet is a machine created to compel attention. It pulls the mind in a hundred different directions. Even if I silence all notifications and such, everything about the Web is set up to take my eyes away from what I’m looking at to some new destination, and then another, in rapid succession. A book, on the other hand, is an object that cannot become other than what it is at the click of a mouse key. Rather than compelling attention, the human mind at first rebels at the constraints of the medium. Nature wants us looking around for predators and prey, wants us focused on our surroundings. Books take us away from where we are, and we can only stay in that other place through force of will. Books slow the mind to the speed of thought. There is no natural analogue to reading. No animal can derive meaning from written words, can encode ideas in physical form. Apart from love, reading is the most human thing we can do.
Above: An example of something you might read on the internet, chosen totally at random.
In fairness, almost no one- historically speaking- read much. Taken in its totality, most of the people of the past departed from the earth without encountering a single written character. But even in societies that were mostly illiterate, there were mechanisms that brought written material to broader audiences, a class of educated people, religious and secular, who transmuted books into knowledge for those unable to do so for themselves. Reading in the past was generally a group activity- the lone, silent reader in the Middle Ages was an oddball. But all of this is premised on the notion that some forms of knowledge occupy a place of privilege above others, that a society that reflects those values will sort itself into a hierarchy that perpetuates itself through bonds of loyalty and mutual obligation. People who accept those values, even if they live in a society that fetishizes equality and materialism, will, on their own initiative, seek out such knowledge to the exclusion of more practical concerns.
But our elites, such as they are, are defined solely and exclusively by their facility with practical concerns- with the efficient ordering of material production, accumulation, and transfer- and thus are animated by a drive to render everything they can uniform, fungible, quantifiable, and predictable. There is nothing to which the system is more hostile than the person who does not need its ministrations. Contrarily, there is nothing it cares for more, and does more to serve, than those who are the most dependent. These values, as with the values of every elite, trickle down and are absorbed by the broader, unreflective elements of society to varying degrees. And I think this is the best systemic explanation for the phenomenon noted in the title, the Library Bum.
AI Slop@AIslop_
3:32 AM · Aug 13, 2026 · 25.9K Views
10 Replies · 50 Reposts · 711 Likes
He’s got a point, we do need oil.
By “bum” I do not mean someone who, through misfortune, has reached a level of material deprivation and isolation that has rendered him without a home or the resources to acquire one. Nor do I mean a person who is so wholly mentally ill that he or she has no functional capacity to live independently. The first individual should be given material assistance and the latter should be involuntarily institutionalized. I mean, rather, a person who might do otherwise, but chooses to become and remain as such. The person I’m referring to could put in the effort to medicate correctly, maintain work, and avoid situations where bad choices might be made. This person simply prefers not to do so. They don’t mind being crazy and they don’t mind the drugs- in fact, they happily engage in both. Regarding the latter, the bum is generally someone so abandoned to moment-by-moment full-spectrum hedonism as to be acutely self-destructive. He renders himself less a man than a wraith, or more properly a ghoul, a monster who inhabits graveyards, feeding on the living.
The bum is the endpoint of the neoliberal project, a perfect client of the system able to be satisfied with minimal material outlay. He doesn’t need to be housed, or fed, or employed. He exists as the object for the management of others, and as an exemplar of liberal ideals. And he is free in that liberal sense, freer than any of us, who live under rules, demands, and expectations. There are no meaningful restraints upon the bum. No one cares what he does with his day; laws don’t really apply to him, his appetites are unconstrained by any social stigma. Though wholly dependent on others to feed his hunger for chemical stimulation, he is the most liberated being possible in the modern West.
There is no higher mark of contemporary power than facilitating the lifestyle of the bum and demonstrating conspicuous concern with his ability to continue bumming freely and openly. If, as Schmitt says, the sovereign is he who decides the exception, the bum is the physical manifestation of that category, a swaggering-staggering symbol of the power of the managerial elites. They will dispatch bums to crap on your sidewalks, shoot up drugs in your children’s playgrounds, grope your daughters in the streets, and murder you in the subway, and you’ll be punished for doing anything about it, or stigmatized for even objecting to general bum carnage. Needless to say, the elites advertise their own freedom from constraints by sequestering themselves far from bums. They’re your problem.
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️@christopherrufo
EXCLUSIVE: California is giving taxpayer-funded meth pipes to the homeless. We went undercover to get one.
3:28 PM · Jul 29, 2026 · 1.39M Views
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I’m not being metaphorical; they’re literally giving them meth pipes and turning them loose on the streets.
It might seem odd, given the wide scope of that problem, that I would focus so specifically on Library Bums, which is to say, the phenomenon of bums spending their daylight hours occupying public libraries. But I think that the Library Bum is a particularly evil manifestation of the problem, one which represents the real schwerpunkt in the battle between liberalism and tradition. And make no mistake- there is no peace possible between the two, Library Bum and library patron. They are mortal enemies.
It takes many years to produce a literate person, which our society can still do reasonably well. But cultivating a reader is a more challenging enterprise, where through rigorous discipline one acquires the habits, skills, and mindset of someone who can comprehend, synthesize, and explain ideas from texts. More than that, the reader is shaped by what he’s read; he doesn’t merely know it, he’s invited the words into his mind as part of a larger product of transcendent growth. He’s someone for whom books have made him more than what he was. He becomes no longer wedded to time and place, but someone able to draw from a wider pool of thought than can be apprehended from the experience of daily life. He’s different, in a way that others, perhaps only intuitively, can sense- one might say, differentiated. He’s escaped the ghetto. Depending on his personality this might make him anything from intensely charismatic to incomprehensibly strange, but in any case, he’s not like the rest.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of any population is fully literate in the sense of being able to read pretty much anything.
Notice that I did not say “scholar,” or “academic,” or “intellectual,” or “high-IQ elite human capital. A reader certainly might be any of those things, and at one time the overlap was much stronger, but given the incentives modernity offers to those seeking to be seen to belong to any of those categories it’s actually a handicap to be broadly and disinterestedly well read. I think it’s possible to be an unintelligent reader- imagine a church janitor in a small town who can barely follow a text but has internalized the whole of the Gospel from decades of careful and attentive absorbing of sermons, such that it has transformed him into a man of manifest wisdom and probity- but I suspect that in modern times that category is tiny. In general, being smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a reader; one must also possess the requisite levels of humility needed to be transformed by books, rather than simply knowing about them. I think that the characteristic pose of reading, silent and with one’s head bowed, says much about the proper attitude with which to approach the undertaking.
(No) Signal@NopeSignal
Imagine being one of his students, checking your socials only to see a video of your teacher literally sobbing about how stupid you are.
Raphouse TV (RHTV) @raphousetv7
High School Teacher Gets Emotional While Discussing The Literacy Of His Students: “They Couldn’t Fill In Four Words” 😢📚💔
12:03 PM · Aug 13, 2026 · 3.5M Views
1.22K Replies · 14K Reposts · 169K Likes
Honestly, if you measure being elite through statistics, it’s getting easier to achieve every day.
If one is blessed with especially sensitive and attentive parents, one might receive some guidance in becoming a reader. One might also encounter a teacher, or some similarly placed mentor as a guide. But one absolutely cannot count on any school, or any modern institution even obliquely dedicated to learning, to shepherd one into such a life. The general tendency of any such enterprise is of a piece with the ruling ideology. Readers are hard to sell things too- they’re too particular, too specific, to demanding. Readers can detect slop a mile away, and since different flavors of slop are the basis of the consumer economy, a critical mass of readers would destabilize the whole thing. So if you wish to become a reader, or help someone else become one, please know that everything around you- including smiling, kindhearted people, will be working against you, consciously or not. A reader is an Anarch, a forest rebel, someone who slips in and out of modernity’s lonely places, revolting against it.
Readers are working outside the system to make the humanities less gay. I honestly can’t believe that history is fruitier than Classics, and how can anything be more homosexual than theater?
You might encounter readers anywhere, but the surest sign you’re among them is if you are in a public library. Certainly, there are likely to be non-readers there as well, but they are the unfortunates so cast off from the economy that they lack wifi at home, and will be surfing the internet as they otherwise would be in their living room. The readers are around the edges, sitting in the stacks, abiding at the plastic-and-particle board tables under the unwelcoming fluorescent lights. They’ll have a stack of books in front of them- the one they were looking for and the others they discovered on the way. They will check some out when they leave, but they’re not in any hurry. They like being there.
The rest of society has an array of third places to choose from, where they feel at ease, a sense of belonging. There are bars, discos, stadiums, strip clubs, chat rooms, gyms- places that demand nothing particular about you, other than your willingness to pay whatever toll there is to enter and engage. They are places to socialize, to have your sense of normalcy ratified by others seeking the same validation. In a liberal democracy, everything is oriented around the masses.
The public library is quite different. It does not function according to any profit motive or anything intrinsic to neoliberalism. The modern library is a holdover from another age, one that still retained enough cultural capital to perpetuate the aristocratic urge toward self-cultivation. Each one represents institutionalized noblesse oblige, the ethos of tradition surviving in those aforementioned lonely places of modernity. There is no reason to be there apart from its ostensible purpose- reading. Unlike a public school, if you’re in a library, you made a choice to be there. There’s no social pressure to go, no urge to conform or gratify some appetite. In fact, if anything, there’s a mild stigma. If you doubt me, ask a coworker if he’d like to hang out after work reading at the library for a few hours. Readers gravitate to libraries because they’re the one place where their pursuits are taken seriously. They represent an opportunity to live according to their values. And while over time, most readers will accumulate a private library reflecting their more particular interests, public libraries are essential for forming personalities dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
And then the Library Bums show up. To be clear, on one level, I pity addicts. I have a history of such in my family, and I am confident that if I had ever in my life downed a single beer or puffed on one cigarette, I would not be alive today. But that I yet survive is testament to the fact that being an addict is a choice, or rather, addiction is- like fitness- the sum of thousands of small choices that add up to habits that in term mold one’s entire being. There are addicts who can function enough to fulfill social obligations and otherwise profit society by their presence, but in my experience the true addict is a bottomless pit of selfishness, sustained by lies and abuse of others. The effect is compounded when, as is often the case, mental illness and personal trauma is involved, but again, from what I’ve encountered, in the addict’s mind the insanity and personal suffering generally become instruments of rationalizing the substance abuse, and he is unwilling to part with any of them. The system, in turn, ratifies these choices- and they are choices- by subsidizing the bum in his bumhood.
Libraries are open to all comers. They are climate controlled, comfortable, and free. Thus, in places with any significant population of bums, they will seek out libraries during the daylight hours. I will again be clear that I’m not referring to people who are simply down on their luck, but choosing to go to the library to apply for help and work, or even better, to read. Such people are to be commended. What I mean are Library Bums proper.
Savanah Hernandez@Savsays
EXPOSED: Austin’s $125 MILLION dollar library is completely OVERRUN with the homeless. The last time I came to this library it was so terrifying that I knew I had to come back to expose how dangerous it is for families and children. Within 2 minutes of visiting, I got stuck
10:50 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 541K Views
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At best, you can find them sprawled out on any piece of furniture that will hold them, sleeping off a drug high, smelling like marijuana boiled in urine, their collection of trash and paraphernalia strewn about them in plastic bags. You’ll encounter them in the bathrooms, tying off or dousing the room with water from the sinks and toilets. They stagger around the stacks, alternately ranting and staring down patrons. And at worst, they seize the opportunity to commit crimes. They steal phones and purses left unattended by people looking for books. They threaten people. Or, as is too often the case, they skip the threats and go straight to the assaults.
Readers can be warriors (Theodore Roosevelt, Junger, and Evola come to mind), but generally, they are inoffensive people adapted to navigating the system rather than confronting it. Faced with naked violence, their instinct is to retreat and redeploy. Thus, the Library Bum is able to claim indoor territory, mark it as his own like a dog might, and sleep safely next to volumes of wisdom that are little more than toilet paper in his own mind. He has the power, and he knows the system has his back.
It’s a matter of debate whether the typical Library Bum infests a library purely because of convenience, or whether he actually, on some level, hates what is going on there and is driven to destroy it by some profound underlying resentment. I think the former theory is certainly very plausible, but I suspect something of the latter is at play as well. There’s a book I love, written by a professor at Rutgers, who sought, unsuccessfully, to stop the descent of his school into a football powerhouse. He spoke of the ways the supporters of the new program sought to colonize space all over campus like some parasitic vine, doing all they could to convey that his university was a place where semi-professional sports came first. There really wasn’t any way to explain the urge to dislodge the primacy of academics other than the genuine contempt the managerial crowd that brought in big time sports had for learning for its own sake. Likewise, I think it makes sense to postulate an instinctual, elemental hatred someone completely abandoned to vice and hedonism must have for someone dedicated to knowledge and self-mastery. I think the Library Bums enjoy the misery they inflict, to the degree that such a creature can be said to enjoy anything.
But whether the havoc they wreak is conscious or a second-order effect of their selfish nihilism, the result is the same. Peaceful people looking to sit quietly and read, mothers hoping to introduce their children to something beautiful, and elderly patrons revisiting the literature of their youth, all have to defer to the abject moral insanity represented by the Library Bum. It would be easy to make the obvious transition here, to say that the real evil is the system that empowers him, and as I’ve noted, that system is evil and inimical to the kind of human flourishing represented by the reader. But no, I blame the bum. Each of us carries the burden of moral agency. The bum chooses to live in the gutter rather than get help. He chooses to enter the library, not to read the books but to piss in the corner while children watch. He chooses degeneracy a thousand times a day. To the degree he can no longer choose to live a better life, it is due solely to years of hardening his heart to all the considerations other than pressing the dopamine button in his brain.
The most loving and productive thing that could be done to help all concerned is the arrest and public flogging of the Library Bum. He must be made to understand, if not with his mind than with his body, that interfering with people seeking to better themselves is simply morally intolerable in a decent society. You don’t have to read. Under liberalism, you are free to live a completely empty life if you so choose. But under no circumstances should you ever be in a position to harm others who have chosen higher things.
When you can’t take down notes, its time to take up knouts
This is, unfortunately, not likely to happen. The normie certainly doesn't like bums, but they also don’t really like readers either. To them, each is weird in their own way, and thus, readers shouldn’t expect any outpouring of support. To return to Theodore Roosevelt, he stayed a nerd as long as he could, but eventually realized that no one was coming to save him, and on his father’s advice built himself up and learned to fight. When a man called him “Four-Eyes” in the Dakota Badlands, Roosevelt laid him out. The saddest but most important thing that a reader must eventually realize is that, while it is possible to duck and dodge the world for a lifetime, you may yet be faced with a situation that cannot be avoided, and it’s not really possible to be a reader without also being a fighter. There can be no peace with the system. It wants your type eliminated and will hunt you down wherever you are. The necromanagerial elites will summon the living dead to invade everywhere you hold sacred. Don’t seek out conflict, but when it comes, do what you have to do so that others can enjoy the freedom you cherish, not the liberation of the bum, the casting off of all restraint, but the joyful discipline of self-mastery through study. You’ve been given much, reader. Do what you must to keep it.
Collin Rugg@CollinRugg
ICE will be spending upwards of $20M for "Shock Gloves" to help de-escalate confrontations with illegal immigrants, according to the AP. The "G.L.O.V.E." is manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC, based in Kentucky. "70% of officers killed with firearms are shot within 10
3:45 PM · Aug 13, 2026 · 4.51M Views
2.84K Replies · 4.99K Reposts · 35.3K Likes
Can you turn pages while wearing them?
Thanks for reading The Library of Celaeno! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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